Up in Ontario

Snowy end to salmon fishing season

Though I held out hope for a few last days on the water, last weekend marked the end of my salmon fishing season. Snow arrived and made the drive up to Squamish slow. Eagles perched in the trees lining the river or soared circling above or hopped along the water's edge to feast on the dead salmon. It was the end.

I took a few photos and felt like a real sadness had settled over the land. The only salmon left in the rivers were old and dying.

I know there's new hope and renewal in the dead salmon, but that day it just felt like the end of a great run.

Here are the photos.

Look at all these bald eagles! (beware: big photo)

Urgent: Request for warm clothes donations

As part of an effort called Project Hats kicked off by Kate at Change Everything, tonight I'll be rounding up some warm clothes I have and dropping them off at the Downtown Eastside Women's Shelter.

The temperature here in Vancouver has dropped well below zero and folks out on the street aren't ready for this kind of cold.

If you have any clothes to add to my stash, please send me an email and I'll see what I can do to come by and round them up. Or, here's a map, you could drop them off yourself.

I'll miss my awesome green wool overalls, because they're the warmest thing going, but now they'll keep someone else toasty.

Name your Porsche

Just when I was starting to wonder if the old adage that 'all Porsche drivers are assholes' had passed into obsolescence, what with Jerome Iginla driving a Porsche, I discover Name Your Porsche.

I wonder if anyone will choose 'asshole'.

Any other suggestions?

Shaming people into voting

Courtesy of the interesting minds behind the Freakonomics blog, a story about a newspaper in Nashville, U.S.A. that publishes the names of citizens who do not vote in elections:

Election year politics reached a new low two weeks ago after the Tennessee Tribune, Nashville’s most influential black newspaper, published the names and addresses of hundreds of non-voting residents from the city’s predominantly black north side. In defending its action, the Tribune insisted that the list, comprised of District 1 residents who did not vote in the August primary, would motivate them to vote in the Nov. 7 general election.

Shame can a powerful motivator, though somehow this feels a little desperate and a little bullying.

Remembrance Day Hunting Photos

Over the Remembrance Day long weekend we were back in Winnipeg to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday. We also did some deer hunting, and I've just posted the photos of our deer hunting trip.

No warning needed for blood or gore. All family friendly fare. Even a kitchy-cute series of the philosophical saying of Tingey's garage signs.

This one goes out to

At the risk of stumping solely for the one you love, here are a few posts from The Duck worth mentioning.

• John Ibbitson's weak column attracts her scorn when he tries to mischaracterize Garth Turner's blog breakup with the Conservative party.
• The Worst Case Scenario Video Contest has kicked off and demonstrates once again that you know who is leading the Canadian publishing industry kicking and screaming to relevance.
• Yesterday was her birthday. It's her birthday party tonight. A leg of lamb is in the oven right now, filling our place with incredible roasting smells. I know because my hands have smelled of garlic, rosemary and thyme all afternoon from rubbing it into the meaty goodness.

Oh, there will be some more fishing tomorrow. Yes there will be.

Salmon fishing on the Squamish River

To keep up with yesterday's theme of eating locally, I submit this photo. Darren and I made a trip up to the Squamish yesterday and landed a few more salmon for the freezer.

Sometimes people asked me, 'what do you do with all that salmon?'

I tell them I'm stacking the freezer like cord wood with fish. It helps balance out the frozen peaches and berries I stockpiled in the summer when they were kill-yourself good and in-season.

At the end of the fishing season I'll be sending the salmon to St Jean's Cannery in Nanaimo to be smoked. I'm almost out of last year's salmon.

So if you're coming over to our place after Christmas, you may be served some Indian candy or smoked and canned salmon, and you'll know where it came from.

A Manitoban 100-Mile Diet

The good folks at the 100-Mile Diet website point me to an article that appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press about one Manitoban's experience trying out the 100-mile diet in Manitoba.

While a month of local eating may seem difficult — OK, ridiculous, during a Manitoba winter — there’s no reason it should be impossible.

In fact, this experiment is actually modelled on the 100-Mile Diet, popularized by B.C. couple Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, who ate within a 100-mile radius for an entire year, with no processed foods allowed, and documented their challenges.

...

Plenty of stores within the province specifically identify locally grown products, and local farmers’ markets draw hundreds, if not thousands of people over the summer.

There are a lot of arguments to support local products, like the environmental and health benefits of eating fresher food that hasn’t been trucked thousands of miles from farm to table.

And by buying Manitoba products, you’re supporting the local economy — giving more of your cash to farmers, producers and distributors, rather than forking it over to middlemen.

Lindsey Wiebe has learned what I have found to be the first rule of eating local: stock up and sock away things that are in season. The bounty of the local land is passing. So when berries are in season, get lots and put them away for later. When the fish are running, as the salmon are right now, gather far and wide while ye may. Something about laurels.

I know, I know. Here's what you're thinking because here's what I think.

It takes effort! planning! and foresight! to prepare and eat food that matters. You're busy. It's hard.

Well, you're right. So? It's food. You put it in you. It is you. It makes you and sustains you. There is nothing more basic, other than water and air. Is it tiresome to say, "you can't live without it?"

Make it count for something other than just seeing you to your next feeding. Put your mouth where your money is.

WorldChanging's Vancouver book launch

Last night the Duck and I attended the book launch for WorldChanging at Workspace.

The Worldchanging book is beautiful, and, at first glance, will act as a great resource for us to make good decisions on an ongoing basis. Yet I have a few concerns about WorldChanging and its way of doing things that make for contradictory messages.

• Why create such a big book, which consumes such amounts of paper, fuel and electricity, to get a message out? Why not publish a PDF or other electronic format with an option to have it produced as a book?
• Why push the purchase of the book through a big business like Amazon.com rather than small, local bookstores and businesses?
• Why insist on such a divisive approach to the world? (For those not in attendance, the host of the evening, Alex Steffen, referred to 'us' and 'them', to 'sides' and continually juxtaposed WorldChanging with another world view, characterized by oil companies. I was left to assume that he meant Conservatives, but this is just straw-man posturing and combative opposition, where each side reduces and imitates the other and people tune out. See: U.S. politics. Certainly not in my mind any way to get to better ways of living or change the world.)
• Why blame the publisher of the book for not allowing the contents to be published for free? If the World Changing crew had wanted to make the contents of the book available, over the web, say, they could have negotiated that into their publishing contract. See: Lawrence Lessig.

Though I think the group of folks involved with World Changing are committed and geniune in their desire to affect change for the better, something about the event last night struck me as a little off. Perhaps it was a lack of transparency in their answers to questions. Perhaps their lack of history or participation with a local community here in Vancouver made the event feel like a whistle stop without much built-in momentum.

I don't know what it was and I don't want to cut down the remarkable efforts they've made to get this book out. We bought a copy and we'll be glad to give it a thorough testing. They've done a tremendous job putting the thing together and rallying effort and attention.

Overall it just felt like they knew they were right in what they were doing. They were very sure of it. And that didn't feel right to me.

The Starbucks Test: My Idea!

I have a claim to make. Here it is.

Almost two years ago I wrote a post I called That Starbucks Feeling that contained my two Starbucks observations. The first isn't the issue here. But here's the second:

There is an almost perfectly indirect relationship between the complexity of someone's coffee order at Starbucks and how much power they feel they have in the world at the moment they make the order.

I am beginning to believe, with nothing but anecdotal evidence, that the great allure of Starbucks for so many is the implicit notion that we can make the barista do whatever we want with that espresso machine and paper cup. The more complex our order, the more we're exercising ourselves, our frustration, our sense of injustice that we're not more recognized in the world, our sense of entitlement.

Ergo, the downtrodden middle manager or office drone orders up the venti, no-whip, half decaf, extra shot, long, dry, non-fat, extra-hot latte, with a twist of lemon. (Nod to Steve Martin, L.A. Story)

Does this jive with your experience of the coffee-ordering process at Starbucks? The complexity of the ordering is vindication and motivation at once for those not receiving their rightful respect / love / money / fawning / etc.

Then tonight I came across (through a roundabout, interlinked path that incorporated the Joyent blog and Guy Kawasaki's review) a book called The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton.

As part of the No Assholes Rule book promotion Mr. Sutton has created The Starbucks Test.

New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low and one NutraSweet," ooh, you're a huge asshole.

!

But the rip off and my indignant outrage don't end there!

Mr. Sutton mentions George Carlin as a mistaken origin for the idea, then says that Snopes' New Rules for 2006 attributes the idea to Bill Maher. Bill Maher! The crook!

Check the dates. I posted That Starbucks Feeling back in January 2005!

Lordy. Do the lies and rip off artists, the cons and sham smarties out there have an end? Is there no limit to the depths these people will stoop to?

I don't know. (shaking head)

I just don't know.

Buy my book.

Winter Farmer's Market and 100 Mile Recipes

The Tyee has a great article (100-Mile Diet's Winter Menu) reminding me that the winter farmer's markets are set to start tomorrow, Saturday, November 4th here in Vancouver, at the WISE Hall (1882 Adanac Street at Victoria - Map).

The series of winter markets will run on the first Saturday or every month until April 10th. They start at 10 am and end at 2 pm. It's short and irregular, like something private.

I'd recommend getting there right at opening hours, or slightly before, to score the good stuff. I don't know how many stands will be in the place or how packed the place will be. We'll have to try it to know.

The same article on The Tyee also contains a very interesting recipe for Pumpkin Soup, a meal perfectly suited to the deluge of rain today brought. I feel some soup coming on. Here's what I'm imagining for Sunday:

• get up early and set the over to 275F
• slide that pork shoulder roast I seasoned with a rub the night before into the oven
• head out fishing (did I mention Darren and I went fishing yesterday too? We did, with good results.)
• return with a strong appetite to incredible smells
• watch the Winnipeg Blue Bombers play
• eat pork

Somehow I see some Pumpkin Soup added to that scenario now.

Canada Screens: A Canadian Film Series

This coming Sunday, Nov. 5, we'll be heading to the excellent Vancity Theatre at the (mouthful) Vancouver International Film Festival Film Centre to see Eve and the Fire Horse.

The Vancity Theatre is one of my favourite theatres of the city, with the best seating and sound anywhere. Their popcorn also rates pretty highly, though I haven't included it in my ratings of the popcorn of Vancouver theatres, yet.

The Sunday presentation of Eve and the Fire Horse is part of a series called Canada Screens from the First Weekend Club, a free club for fans of Canadian film.

I really like the Canada Screens series, now in it's second year. Last year I saw It's All Gone Pete Tong at the Vancity Theatre, which made all the difference with its incredible sound.

Canada Screens shows one movie per month and the forthcoming line up looks really good. Seducing Dr. Lewis, which I've seen and enjoyed, The Rocket and Hard Core Logo all pass muster on my radar at worth seeing. Especially Hard Core Logo, since I'm a fan of Bruce Macdonald's work and I haven't seen it.

For a $10 ticket anyone is welcome to join us.